1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an equipment with a scanning type carrier and, more particularly, to an equipment suitably used for scanning an ink-jet recording head, a reading sensor, and the like as functional elements.
2. Related Background Art
A conventional recording apparatus for performing recording by scanning an ink-jet recording head described in, e.g., Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 1-221251 has an arrangement in which different heads (a head for an image scanner, recording heads for different colors, and a color recording head) are mounted on a plurality of carriages, and the driving control operations of these carriages are independently performed to scan them. A recording apparatus described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2-1327 has an arrangement in which recording heads are mounted on host and slave driving carriages, these carriages are connected to or disconnected from each other as needed, and the driving control operation of the host driving carriage is performed to select a scanning operation of only the host driving carriage or a concurrent scanning operation of both carriages. On the other hand, a recording apparatus described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 58-136450 has an arrangement in which a holder for stationarily holding a recording head, which is to be exchangeably mounted on a carrier, so as to maintain a predetermined posture is arranged, and the recording head is attached/detached to/from the carrier while being stationarily held by the holder by means of the movement of the holder or the carrier and the operation of an attachment/detachment mechanism such as a chuck.
However, as described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Nos. 1-221251 and 2-1327, in the arrangement comprising a plurality of carriages which mount heads, various operation modes corresponding to the types of heads mounted on the carriages can be obtained by selectively scanning the plurality of carriages, while the recording apparatus becomes bulky and the driving and control mechanisms are complicated due to the presence of the plurality of carriages. In the apparatus described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 58-136450, since the holder stationarily holds the recording head in a posture upon mounting the head on the carrier, the posture of the recording head held by the holder and the positional relationship between the carrier and holder must be determined with high precision to allow accurate and smooth exchange of the head, and it is difficult to hold the recording head in a standby state with a simple mechanism, resulting in a complicated and large-scale apparatus as a whole.